Poems in November by Mary Cuffe Perez

Read these poems to linger and luxuriate in the austere, bittersweet beauty of November in the northeast. They catch their human subjects amid the chores of the last of the garden, planting bulbs, tending the mare, and noting “A swarm of leaves/twisting time” and how “…ice, once again,/takes up its mending.” These are poems both of what November does to the land but also how the human spirit settles in with its gifts (“low light nests/inside a grove of beech…”) and losses: “Wherever she looks/hunger looks back.”

–Marilyn McCabe, author of Glass Factory and Perpetual Motion

In Poems in November, Mary Cuffe Perez writes, “Leafless,/trees lean into silence./This is what they are here for,/not to say what the wind will have them say/but to listen .…” Likewise, this poet leans into the silence and severe beauty of a family farm, her task to listen and to see. Here are “Apples red as ardency,/tasting of birch buds and ginger.” But here, too, is life beyond the senses, for these are poems filled with the life of the mind. The poet marvels, “It could be March as easily as November./A cup half filled.”  Readers will drink deeply from this entrancing collection

–Suzanne Cleary, author of four poetry collections, and national award winner of the Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, among many others. www.suzanneclearypoet.com

Mary Perez has created a carefully etched picture of a family farm slowly falling apart and the lives of the people who occupy it. Her observations are sharp, accurate, convincing. These poems, like November, are in shades of grey, sparse, powerful and sticking in the mind when you put the book down.

–Marge Piercy, author of 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women as well as 19 volumes of poetry and a critically acclaimed memoir, Sleeping with Cats.